Minister Jacques Fame Ndongo, as usual, holds a muscular speech while feigning a will to dialogue on the Anglophone crisis, which in reality does not deceive many people, neither in Cameroon nor in the international community. In fact, it was the dictatorship of Yaoundé literally laid bare. This is because Fame Ndongo, like another brilliant ideologue of the Biya’s regime, Mathias Owona Nguini, have one grave problem: They are “creatures” of Paul Biya. They know the lyrics to every democratic song, but they cannot carry the tune. Which explains, in both funny and sad ways, the remarkable little intellectual or ideological substance provided by these intellectuals and ideologues to solve the Anglophone crisis.
In reality, consequently, the anachronistic position of these apparatchiks of Paul Biya’s illegitimate and thirty-five year-old regime hide are their collective fear of seeing themselves practically overwhelmed and then ousted by a movement of civil disobedience which they successively denied, minimized, and then savagely repressed without success.
But to this sordid game of obstinately preserving power for power sake, it is first of all Cameroon which emerges more fragile, weakened, and deeply divided, notably of these various massacres of an Anglophone civilian population of which it is hoped that M Fame Ndongo and many of his comrades from the so-called Cameroon’s People Democratic Movement (CPDC) will one day be able to answer before the international judicial authorities.
For no one has ever worked for peace, national concord, and the territorial indivisibility of a country by sowing so much military terror on a part of it, in the name of a timely confrontation against “agitators”.
Urgency first requires restraint and then a genuine, open, frank, and direct dialogue on a new Cameroonian consensus between the different components of Cameroon, to which Anglophones are much more than a “specificity”or a “particularism”of history. The Anglophone crisis, consequently, is not just a problem of semantic. Thus, this isn’t just a semantic point. The Anglophone streets are no longer an army for Paul Biya to command. They have their own agenda which is not Biya’s agenda. The Anglophones are simply mad as hell and don’t want to take it anymore. Biya and the Apparatchiks of his regime can’t no longer pretend to ignore that anger. Ideally they’d channel it toward productive ends. But further letting the situation to rot is not just ill-advised, it’s pointless, because eventually real politicians have to take their share of responsibility.
In consequence, a new structure must be put into place to require Cameroonian politicians to work through a democratic system if they’re going to get anything productive done. The time of the permanent lure is over. The patches will no longer suffice to resolve the English problem on a long-term basis.
The Commitee For The Release of Political Prisoners (CR2P / CL2P)
